Hot Air
by Pearl Gatsby
Summary: in which a non-conversation is had. :: Post-Hogwarts. EWE. Oneshot.


In which a non-conversation is had.

Written for Hogwarts School of Witchcraft & Wizardry (Challenges & Assignments), where I am a Slytherin (as I should be). Prompt: _Write about getting caught in the rain._

 **.**

Normally, things like this would be beneath Draco Malfoy. As it is, life has been anything but "normal" for the last five years, and even though he knows he's nearing the end of his three-year wand restriction, that's not enough of a comfort as he wrings the ends of his robes out over the sink in the dimly-lit café bathroom.

You'd think they might have done something to restrict the type of spells he could cast—surely there's a way to do that. But no—instead, he's banned from carrying his wand except at work, within the confines of the Ministry. As a result he's learned to deal with a host of stupid and inconvenient Muggle things, like umbrellas and wellies and other accoutrements that are damned near ineffective against rainstorms.

Draco isn't stupid. He knows what stormy weather looks like. He knows that the downpour was expected. But when it comes a good hour early, and he's already set out down the street, and home is so much further in the other direction than the coffee shop, and he has an understanding with the shop owner that the table in the back in the darkest corner is his—well, he's just surprised something like this _hasn't_ happened before now.

The magnitude is still surprising, though. Draco looks like a drowned rat. His fringe is plastered to his forehead and dripping beads of water down the bridge of his nose; his shoes squelch when he walks; and the dress pants and button-up shirt with a sport coat under the robes are all soaked through as well. He looks like a joke, which is just as well, as this whole arrangement has been a joke. He's learned to live with it, but it's made him feel humiliated and bitter, the way the Ministry pretends their offer of a job was an olive branch, a true measure of trust. Draco is smart enough to see through it. He's always under surveillance, always being evaluated. They let him work there so they can keep him under control.

"Rubbish," he spits at the mirror when wringing out the ends of his robes doesn't begin to solve the problem of how wet all of his clothes are. And then "rubbish" isn't expressive enough, so he follows it with a colorful string of curses, clenching his teeth around them all the same.

"Honestly," a female voice says from the doorway.

"Occupied," he grumbles in the direction of the voice, but it continues—

"I didn't realize it was possible to get _this_ wet in a rainstorm."

"Well it is when the bloody rain goes _sideways_ and your damned useless Muggle umbrella flips itself inside-out," Malfoy snaps, recognizing the voice as he turns to glare. He doesn't even have to see her bushy hair or her smug little know-it-all face to know it's _Granger_ standing there in the doorway. When his gaze finally lands on her, of course he's right, though perhaps his memory-image of her isn't so accurate—her hair seems somehow tamer, her facial expression somehow less smug.

She frowns at him, just slightly, but then she's entering the single-occupancy restroom and reaching for his robes.

"What—"

Draco barely has time to open his mouth before Hermione interrupts him.

"You're not going to dry off just leaving all the layers on," she's saying, tugging the robe off his shoulders. "The more layers, the longer it'll take to dry."

Draco is so baffled that, for a moment, he gives in. He allows the robes to be pulled off and deposited in the sink, reflecting briefly on the fact that the witch has barely spoken to him since he last spoke to her. Not that _that_ had exactly gone over well.

It was because he always passed her in the hallway, sometimes more than once a day. Her department was on the way to his. And after working in the same building as her for two and a half years, after dealing with all the frustrations of basically living like a Muggle except during work hours, after being forced out of his home into a small apartment (another part of the Wizengamot's deal with his family: Malfoy Manor would be scrubbed of any Dark magic or artefacts, and until it was deemed clear by Aurors, none of the Malfoys could set foot inside)—something about it just _got to_ him.

It was something about the way she glanced at him so nervously whenever they accidentally made eye contact in the hall—like she was _afraid_ of him. Of course this was normal behavior for most Ministry employees, even the ones who pretended to like him. Still. In all their childhood spats, Hermione had stood her ground or lashed out—but never had she seemed afraid.

And so he'd shown up at her office. He'd repeated his apology, the one he delivered to her before the Wizengamot, but this time in detail—perhaps too much. "I still have nightmares about you on the parlor floor," he'd blurted, and that was all it took for the mask to slip.

He'd told her how he knew in those days that his own life meant nothing, the lives of his parents and childhood friends meant nothing, that they were all disposable as far as the Dark Lord was concerned. He might have told her how Bellatrix had turned her wand on him, too, from time to time, just for practice. He hadn't told her how he'd nearly stopped eating, how he could barely keep food down—that was something she'd brought up, something she'd noticed herself in their sixth year. The whole conversation was so frank, so unlike every conversation he'd had since the trial, that he'd kept talking until she invited him to sit in the chair beside her desk. She'd poured him a glass of firewhiskey—surprising to see that in her desk drawer—and then one for herself, and they'd talked and listened to each other like real adults. It was the most refreshing and also emotionally exhausting conversation he'd had since—since maybe _ever_.

But in the days after, she'd been gone from the office. A short leave of absence, he'd heard, or an international trip—but Draco thought it was too convenient. She was away for several weeks in total; and when he crossed paths with her again they were back to curt nods in the hallway, nothing more.

—That is, until just a moment ago, when she'd barged into his private pity party and started ordering him around. She reaches for the sport coat and he takes a step back, his shoes making yet another loud, wet sound. He attempts, again, to protest: "Now—"

"Malfoy, I'm trying to help you," Hermione admonishes, still reaching for the lapel of the sport coat. Draco takes another step back, and Hermione advances, most frustrated than ever. "The hot-air charm is only _so_ effective, and with all these wet layers of clothing I'll be standing here _blowing_ you for ages!"

"Uh—" a low voice from the doorway stops both of them. A mousy, bespectacled, middle-aged wizard is peering in, looking more than a little horrified.

Hermione looks back to Draco, her expression nearly mirroring the expression of the man in the doorway. It's just long enough for Draco to see her cheeks go a bit pink, and then she's stepping forward to push the door closed. "Use the ladies' next door," she snips as the door clicks shut. She locks it for good measure, then turns back to Draco.

He can't help the smirk he feels spreading across his face. "So, Granger," he drawls, unable to resist, "just how is it you were going to 'help' me?"

"Oh, shove it," she says, her cheeks coloring even further as she begins the complex wand-pattern to activate the hot-air charm. "It blows a jet of hot air. –That's the charm. You _know_ that."

"I'm sure that locking the door so you could undress me doesn't look suspicious at _all_."

The way she grumbles, her face getting even redder as she points her wand at him, only makes it funnier.

"They'll all be talking now," he teases. "Tomorrow's headline in the _Daily Prophet_. 'HERMIONE GRANGER _BLOWS_ —'"

She turns the jet of hot air toward his head and he ducks instinctively.

"Your hair, you arse," she reminds him, her tone bossy but still not actively upset. Draco holds still as the hot air warms his scalp, running his fingers through his hair in an attempt to be somewhat presentable.

She is, in fact, helping. A few sweeps of her wand and his clothes feel considerably drier, though the sport coat seems to have absorbed a lot of water. He shrugs it off and holds it out so she can dry it and him separately, avoiding saying anything because nothing seems appropriate. They proceed in silence for a few moments before Hermione inquires about his shoes and he removes them.

"I'm sure you'll be glad when this is all over," she says vaguely in the direction of his shoes, passing her wand slowly across them.

"Well I'm certainly not happy to be drenched in rainwater."

"I mean your restrictions." She glances up at him briefly, just a flicker of eyes.

"Yes, that also."

"Been quite busy in the office?" She glances up at him briefly as she asks, her expression a bit pinched.

"No, not particularly," Draco lifts an eyebrow, waiting, but she doesn't look up at him again.

This time the silence is less comfortable. Draco can't help but feel that she's doing the thing women do when there's something to be said but they're dancing around it. "I'm sure you're far too busy with work yourself," he says finally, wondering if that will draw it out.

Hermione doesn't respond—at least not to anything that's been said. She instructs him to put on his sport coat and hold his robes for her while she dries them last. The expression she tries to hide from him spells danger, as if she's angry at him, though Merlin knows why.

"You'll be leaving the Ministry, I take it?" Hermione asks from the other side of his robes, her voice high and clipped. She's just short enough that he can't see her face below where he's stretching out the fabric.

It's just too much. Draco snaps at her. "To do what? And go where?"

"No, you're right, I—"

Behind the shield of his robes Hermione mutters something quickly, but Draco's frustration boils over and he twists it into the sneer he does so well—"Have you forgotten I was a Death Eater? Not the most desirable employee."

"—I don't know what I—"

"I can barely show my face in the Ministry itself—"

"—Malfoy—"

"Is this the plan—to let me go as soon as I'm deemed not a menace to society?"

"Stop!" Hermione grabs a fistful of his robes and yanks them out of his hands, snatching them back and glaring straight up into his face. Draco glares back.

"I don't need your charity, witch," Draco snarls, reaching for the robes she's still clutching.

"Charity!" Hermione sputters back, taking a step out of his reach. She hesitates a moment, then flings his robes toward the sink. "How _dare_ you—"

"How dare I _what_?" Draco roars. "How _dare_ I refuse to let good little Granger do a good turn?"

"I'm not—" Hermione starts to shout, but then she just shakes her head back and forth, tears pooling unexpectedly in her eyes. When she speaks again, her voice is low. "I thought that—that afternoon in my office, when you came to talk… I thought that you wanted to be my friend." She clenches her teeth against the way her face threatens to crumble. "I thought that out of all this mess—that finally something would come of it, something _good_."

When Draco doesn't respond immediately, she swipes at the tears in her eyes and begins to turn as if to go.

"If it mattered—" Draco's words stop her. She turns back to him as he continues—"then why did you up and leave for weeks on end? Why was it the next I saw you, you were giving me that _don't talk to me_ nod—?"

"What in Merlin's name does that mean?" Hermione crosses her arms, then uncrosses them again as soon as she begins speaking. "My door was open! My door is always open! I thought that—we'd reached—and you think that I left because—Merlin!"

None of this is making sense. Draco frowns. "You made it clear you didn't want to see me."

" _You_ made it clear you didn't want to see _me_ ," she repeats. "I told you when you left that you could come by again. Maybe I should've told you I'd be away for a time, but we weren't _there_ —it wasn't the kind of thing to share. Especially just after…" Her ire has softened, but she hasn't completed a sentence yet to Draco's satisfaction. He goes to question her, but she puts up a hand, continues.

"I left Ron. It wasn't just that day—it had been weeks before—but just before you walked in I requested that time, to take a step back and make sense of it all. You see, Ron was furious. Harry pretended not to be but he was clearly on Ron's side, and Ginny wouldn't speak to me. I—I felt so… isolated.

"Part of it was that Ron wouldn't talk about the war. He wouldn't listen, either. We all cope differently, so I couldn't hold it against him; but I also knew that if that's the way it was going to be, we weren't going to work out in the long run. I _have_ to talk about it. And with all of this weighing me down, in _you_ come, dredging up all your own memories and for all the world looking as if you want nothing more to talk. And for the first time in _months_ I'm face-to-face with someone who wants to tell me the honest _truth_."

Hermione's been gesturing idly with her hands, but now she drops them, looking to the floor. "When I finally came back, you didn't come see me, so I thought—you'd used me. Checked off your guilt as amended and moved on."

"I didn't recall you inviting me back," Draco says, picking an invisible piece of lint from his lapel, unable to look her in the eyes any longer. He feels sufficiently chastised, a feeling he's not fond of. Her logic is easy enough to follow now, but up until this point he never would've guessed. He tells her as much.

Hermione just goes for his robes, lifting them out of the sink and turning them over in her hands until she's found the top. When Draco is finally fully-clothed Hermione steps into his personal space, still silent, adjusting his lapel again, tugging at the layers of fabric as they fall across his shoulders. There's something intimate about the gesture, and she must feel it, too—Draco notices how her cheeks have flushed slightly when she pulls back.

"I hope everything's dry," Hermione says softly, glancing up at him for a moment, her eyes half-lidded, and Draco has the most startling revelation of perhaps his entire life—

She's not just being kind to him. She's not just angry at him. She's not just indignant he didn't come back to speak to her. No, Hermione Granger _fancies_ him.

The realization takes less than a split second, but with it comes the vivid memory of the fantasy he had in fifth year, the one in which she plays the solitary starring role—accompanying that, a wave of _desire_ so unexpected that he's frozen to the spot, watching her step back, lower her gaze, turn for the door.

Normally, things like this would be below Draco Malfoy. He's a Slytherin, after all—a man who knows tricks to get other people to do what he wants. He's an expert at biding his time—it's practically all he's done since the end of the war. But for some absolutely confounding reason, he's desperate, determined not to wait any longer. The one woman he used to loathe above all others is simply _not_ getting away from him.

He stops her with a hand to her shoulder. "—Coffee?"

She pauses, turning back toward him. "Er—now?"

Draco nods, trying his best to keep his expression neutral.

"Ah, y-yes," Hermione tucks a strand of hair behind her ear, trying to cover up her nervousness by turning back into the woman who barged into the bathroom and forced him to accept her help. She meets his gaze directly, her eyes almost issuing a challenge, the smallest smile tugging at the corner of her lips. "Yes. Very well."


End file.
